I guess it's more nuanced than that.
I'm not a cryptographer but I always found the claim dubious that in P2PKH, hashing gave the private keys an extra layer of protection. There is probably millions of coins protected with known pub keys either from P2PK or from address re-use, so if the cryptography for those was found to be fundamentally broken, Bitcoin would die or at least lose years of adoption in the chaos. If the hashing was necessary, we would have had to rotate plain key use out and if that's not done, why bother to use hashing in the first place?
Furthermore the hashing used reduces the search space, meaning there is many more private keys that can spend from a P2PKH UTXO than from a P2PK so - I'm not a cryptographer but a mathematician - I imagine if the math involved in both secp256k1 and sha256 is in some weird way related, hashing could make it easier instead of harder to find a valid key.
Leo Wandersleb
npub1gm…78rf6
2024-01-19 16:37:07
in reply to nevent1q…93km
Author Public Key
npub1gm7tuvr9atc6u7q3gevjfeyfyvmrlul4y67k7u7hcxztz67ceexs078rf6Published at
2024-01-19 16:37:07Event JSON
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"content": "I guess it's more nuanced than that.\n\nI'm not a cryptographer but I always found the claim dubious that in P2PKH, hashing gave the private keys an extra layer of protection. There is probably millions of coins protected with known pub keys either from P2PK or from address re-use, so if the cryptography for those was found to be fundamentally broken, Bitcoin would die or at least lose years of adoption in the chaos. If the hashing was necessary, we would have had to rotate plain key use out and if that's not done, why bother to use hashing in the first place?\n\nFurthermore the hashing used reduces the search space, meaning there is many more private keys that can spend from a P2PKH UTXO than from a P2PK so - I'm not a cryptographer but a mathematician - I imagine if the math involved in both secp256k1 and sha256 is in some weird way related, hashing could make it easier instead of harder to find a valid key.",
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